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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 652 



These are the academic department, the 

 professional and graduate schools, and the 

 instructing staff. Not that each organ 

 pursues a single aim, or that the ends 

 desired are always logically, nor perhaps 

 most effectively, promoted by the present 

 subdivision of oiir institutions, but each 

 organ purports, at least, to lay particular 

 stress on one of these objects. 



In addition to these objects our universi- 

 ties and colleges are yearly rendering 

 another great service to the whole country, 

 by helping to create a universal standard 

 of citizenship, to diffuse an American ideal, 

 and it is of this that I wish to speak. 



Men whose lives have passed the half- 

 century mark can remember, after the re- 

 construction of the south was over, loose 

 talk about the next split coming between 

 the east and west; and there were people 

 who really felt that the Atlantic seaboard 

 and the prairie differed so much in material 

 interests and methods of thought that the 

 republic might not improbably be hereafter 

 rent along the line of a meridian. The 

 suggestion would only provoke a smile to- 

 day. The railroads and the growth of 

 manufactures in the west have so blended 

 the interests of the different sections of the 

 country that such an idea has become an 

 absurdity. Nor has the nation become more 

 homogeneous on the material side alone; 

 for the intellectual and moral bonds have 

 been drawn closer also, and in this the uni- 

 versities have had no small share. 



But if the sectional specter no longer 

 frightens timid soids, we still suffer acutely 

 from a lack of uniformity of national stand- 

 ards in other directions. Any candid ob- 

 server of the business methods revealed by 

 the investigations of the New York life- 

 insurance companies, and of the discrim- 

 ination on the part of the railroads, can 

 hardly fail to perceive that the misconduct 

 which shocked the public was due at least 

 as much to the lack of moral standard as 



to the deliberate violation of recognized 

 rules of honesty. Two men quarreled 

 publicly over the control of a great in- 

 surance company, both of them clearly un- 

 conscious that there was anything repre- 

 hensible in the methods of administration; 

 but when the management was exposed to 

 view, the community was shocked and a 

 cry was raised for reform. In the same 

 way discriminating freight rates were de- 

 manded and given a score or more years 

 ago without a sense that the transaction 

 differed essentially from a reduction made 

 to a large customer by a private manufac- 

 turer. Every one, indeed, who has had 

 anything to do with the centers of business 

 life in this country must have been struck 

 with the lack of a fixed code of principles 

 in the management of corporations ; and he 

 must have seen both the snare this spreads 

 for the unwary, and the explosion of lack 

 of confidence caused by the uncovering of 

 an extreme instance of a kind of thing that 

 everybody knows is constantly occurring in 

 a milder form. The rules that ought to 

 govern the relation of a director of his cor- 

 poration in matters of underwriting, in the 

 matter of financial operations with bankers 

 or brokere with which he is connected- 

 many things of this kind are to-day in a 

 state of uncertainty, and the series of busi- 

 ness transactions goes by imperceptible 

 degrees from a perfectly honorable act at 

 one end of the scale, to an act at the other 

 end that excites general indignation when 

 it is revealed ; and yet there is no point at 

 which a line can be drawn and a warning 

 given 'thus far shalt thou go and no far- 

 ther.' Often in human affairs it is more 

 important that a line should be drawn than 

 it is at what precise point that line is 

 drawn; for 'where there is no vision the 

 people perish.' The fact is that the new 

 business methods, the new possibilities of 

 combination on a gigantic scale, have made 

 old canons inadeqiiate, and brought the 



